Posts Tagged ‘learning football’

Be still, our hearts! It’s that time again. NFL Preseason Football kicks off with the Dallas Cowboys vs the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, August 4, at 8:00PM on NBC.

Actually, that’s sort of pre-preseason football, since it’s technically the annual Hall of Fame Game, played in Canton Ohio.

The Official First NFL Preseason Football Game is on Thursday, August 8, at 7:30, between Baltimore and Tampa Bay.

We’re giving you all these details about preseason football out of a sense of guilt. We realize we haven’t been there for you for a while now. Oh, it’s not that we haven’t been thinking about you. Much of our time has been taken up with writing a novel that, although it has nothing to do with football, does expand on the ‘lovers’ aspect of our paperback guide to the game, Football is for Lovers. Also, we’ve been creating a website that gives you more details about football plays and football positions and football trivia and football history and just more good ol’ football stuff then we could ever fit in our blog.

But there’s one time-consuming activity we’ve been soldiering on with (with which we’ve been soldiering on?) that really pushed our empathy button. We’ve been trying to digitalize (or . . . er . . . is that ‘digitize?) Football is for Lovers so that it would be available on Amazon’s Kindle Program. Given that we’re not even sure of the correct terminology, you might guess (and rightly so!) that we’re in deep trouble.

The thing is, we’re hopeless luddites. Cyber tech stuff like this digit-whatever that would take your average ten year old about five minutes to master takes us more like a year. Still, we’re hoping to have it ready at the beginning of NFL preseason. And we do mean 2013 NFL preseason. Then again, as Kaye’s Mom always said, “Live in hope, die in despair.” Anyway, we’re working on it.

But here’s the ‘empathy’ part. It’s been a reminder (as if we needed one!) of just how frustrating it is to try to learn something new. Especially something for which you might have little aptitude. And even less desire.

For us, writing (in case you’re wondering, the novel we’re working on now is about lovers and pizza) is always a joy. Hey, we’ve been writing stuff forever, and we’d keep on doing it even if nobody ever paid us . . . which is probably a good thing, since, mostly, nobody ever does.

But tech stuff?! Sheesh. Like we said: luddites through and through. But after Bob’s stroke, a lot of stuff we did before, we couldn’t do anymore. So Internet, here we came! Maybe we lacked desire, but certainly not motivation: the survival instinct is a great catalyst.

Heck, we even taught ourselves how to create webpages with HTML. Not great webpages, mind you. But adequate. And definitely not easily.

What’s that got to do with you? Well, it occurred to us that, for many of you, our conquering HTML might be sort of like your understanding football.

Which brings us back to the catalyst requirement. Why do what you don’t want to do if you don’t have a good reason? Well, learning football may not rank too high on the list of needful things for survival.

But not being estranged from your beloved from August NFL preseason through the February Super Bowl might at least provide some incentive.

And then, there are all those lovely little romantic perks we talk about in Football is for Lovers. And that we will continue to talk about here all through football season. And beyond.